3 Industry Leaders Share Their Innovation Mission ROI

Innovation Missions are about more than learning and networking…they’re about real ROI! Here are three examples of how industry leaders are taking action on what they took home from a recent regional Innovation Mission.

Jay Horton, SVP, DEV/Con Detect
After the SF IM, the DEV/CON CEO and I scheduled and spent a day and a half in the field with one of our customers on a design thinking field trip. We dove deep and immersed ourselves into the step by step processes of the customer as they showed us how they completed certain relevant tasks – and engaged with them to get a better understanding of their frustrations with current tools and to get their thoughts on how things could be better. Our observations and the subsequent discussions led us to several of the best product enhancements we had in Q1.

Sandeep Thakur, Business Architect, Univision
During the SF visit, I got opportunity to talk to both my peers and industry experts around how data is being used effectively to target consumers effectively. Some of the discussions gave us ideas around how to do better email campaigns, how small businesses can leverage digital marketing capabilities, things to consider when building capabilities around data marketing platforms. All the inputs and feedback received during the visit helped me validate the data collection and marketing solution we built in Univision. Some of the experiments we did were as follows:

Better Email Click Rates and Open Rates

We tweaked the timings of the email campaigns to increase our email open rates. Originally emails were sent late night to avoid traffic, but when we sent emails around 9 AM our email open rates were increased.

We made email content (subject and the email body) specific to audience profiles to increase customer engagement and click rates. Originally one email was sent for all the target audiences, but when we sent emails with contents specific to the demographics we have targeted our email click rate increased (11 to 14%)

Doug Villhard, Co-Founder & President, Second Street
At Second Street we’ve really focused on the (customer) “empathy” theme that came from the “design thinking” training. We have aspects of the “empathy” theme in our 2018 corporate goals, customer “interviews” we’ve been performing, and it will be a major emphasis in the keynote address I will give at the Second Street Summit this summer in St. Louis.